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Disruption reverberating through legal ed
A ‘double-whammy’ of disruption to the legal industry and higher education is creating new challenges for those educating the next generation of lawyers, a law dean has highlighted.
Grace Ormsby
Source: bond.edu.au
Speaking to Lawyers Weekly last week amid celebrations for the university’s 30th anniversary, Bond University’s executive dean of the faculty of law, Professor Nick James, has explained that new technology and new markets “are really shaking things up” for academic lawyers.
Academic lawyers have now “got to deal with what’s happening out there in the sector and what’s happening in here at the academy”, Professor James said, which means he must ensure the law school keeps up with changes happening externally.
“My challenge as a dean, is to [ensure] that we don’t teach law the way it was [practiced 20 years ago. We want to teach it so that it’s relevant for now,” he explained.
The fact is “the people we’re teaching are going to be lawyers in three to five years, [and] they are going to be hitting their stride in ten years’ time”. Professor James conceded that this was the hard part for academics, while simultaneously considering it as the “most important” aspect.
“We have to kind of think – what’s it going to be like in ten years’ time?” he queried, so that they can prepare students for their careers, despite that being a “really hard” task.
A lot of the time, Professor James noted students “are kind of ignorant” about the layers of disruption they are facing in their legal education and “need to be told about it”.
“When they first hear about it they are like ‘oh my god – what?’ and then we have to reassure them that it’s change,” he said.
But, “it’s not the apocalypse that some people were talking about a few years ago,” he continued.
“It’s going to look really different but it’s going to be really cool and exciting.”
“You’ve got more options than you’ve ever had before, so don’t worry, just make sure you stay on top of it all,” he said.
Calling efforts to combat the effects of disruption “a two-way conversation”, Professor James explained the importance of the dialogue that occurs between his law school and the profession.
“Sometimes we look at what’s happening out there – we talk to the firms and we talk to NewLaw people and we say ‘oh that’s interesting, we didn’t know that, we really need to acknowledge that’,” he stated.
Other times, the professor said that the Bond University Law School will “try and lead it in the sense that we’re the ones that need to predict where [the profession is] going so that we prepare the students, and we can sit back and have a big picture view”.
Not that he always agrees with some of the things that are happening… but the role of academics in the field “is to question it”.
“So sometimes we follow what’s happening in the sector, and sometimes we try and lead the sector and have a wider view than the sector,” he re-iterated.
“We’re adjusting, we’re evolving, we’re changing,” the executive dean acknowledged.
